Letters: Musk’s ‘Zero Deaths’ Claim, AI’s Purpose and Africa’s Cities

Readers respond to our interview with Elon Musk and to recent coverage of work, households and cities. This week’s selection challenges the claim that USAID cuts caused no deaths, questions what gives life meaning when AI can do more, and brings new data and history to debates on incomes and urbanisation.

Letters are welcome via email to letters@economist.com. Find out more about how we process your letter.

Elon Musk, USAID and the “zero” claim

Elon Musk insisted that “zero” children had died in Africa because of the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID (The Insider interview, July 23rd). Mr Musk argued that other organisations could have stepped in. “They are capable of acting very quickly,” he said, “and if they didn’t, I would say they’re equally responsible.”

The effects of the cuts were in fact visible on the ground, but also large enough to see from space. Researchers tracked satellite night-time lights around 1,374 former USAID project sites in 50 African countries. The places that had depended most on that money dimmed relative to the rest, and the share of people living in food crises rose.

Whether the number of lives lost is zero, ten or ten thousand, Mr Musk’s defence rests on a morally bankrupt premise: that one is absolved of responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of one’s actions so long as someone else could, in principle, come along afterwards and clean up the mess. Grant him the impossible, that not one person died, and the moral reasoning is still wrong.

Moreover, even if the Gates Foundation or MacKenzie Scott had been able to fill the gaps in emergency aid to Africa, it would have diverted dollars from their programmes tackling malaria, tuberculosis, childhood nutrition and so forth. Philanthropic budgets are finite. Foundations exist to fund what governments will not, not to serve as insurers of last resort whenever a government abandons commitments it already made.

Could USAID have been better? Of course. Even its most ardent supporters had ideas for improving it. I did not join as chief economist because I saw a bastion of efficiency. I joined because I wanted to help make it better. And when I arrived I found plenty of people inside with the talent and drive to do exactly that, alongside the expected administrative, bureaucratic and political obstacles that made it hard, but not impossible, to do so. While the USAID debate will fade, Mr Musk’s philosophy should be loudly and for ever rejected.

Dean Karlan
Professor of economics and finance
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois

A record of forecasts

It may be a bit premature to take Mr Musk’s forecasts seriously. Consider his record on full self-driving cars, for which there is a devoted Wikipedia page. In 2013 he said 90% of the miles in a Tesla car would be self-driven by 2016. In 2015 he predicted that Tesla would have complete autonomous driving by 2018. In 2016 the date slipped to 2019. Since 2020, it has been “this year” every year. The latest prediction is December 2026, a decade later than he first expected.

Mr Musk is a formidable innovator. But on self-driving cars, as well as Mars, data centres in space, robots and AI, we should treat his prophecies with caution.

Patrick Grady
Brussels

Purpose, abundance and AI

Chess, choirs and allotments

You dismissed Mr Musk’s suggestion that chess and gardening might sustain the human spirit in an age of AI, noting that a “feeling of being superfluous can lead to misery and moral decay” (“Should you be afraid of Elon Musk?”, July 25th). Permit a dispatch from a profession that has been economically superfluous for more than a century. Since the phonograph, every note an orchestra plays has existed in a superior recording at negligible cost. By the logic of usefulness, live orchestras should have disbanded around 1910. Instead the halls keep filling, and, more telling, people keep joining amateur choirs. And more people play chess today than before the machines became unbeatable in the game. Being surpassed emptied the game of careerism, not of meaning.

You are right to press questions on how to finance the transition to AI, tame the upheaval and restrain AI-powered authoritarians. But on the question of what humans will do when nothing needs doing, the research is being conducted weekly, in choirs, chess clubs and allotments.

DAVID WOODARD
Conductor
Tampere, Finland

Robots on Mars

Mr Musk’s Martian aspirations aren’t all crazy. His resources could fund a fleet of Starship rockets, each carrying robots along with solar-energy collectors and other equipment. So, within his lifetime, Mars could be populated with thousands of robots, impervious to heat or cold, doing construction, mining or exploration.

Few humans would aspire to end their days in the hostile Martian environment. But Mr Musk does. He has said he would like to “die on Mars, just not on impact”. He could ensure unique privileges. His regiments of robots could be tasked with creating a domed mansion to accommodate him, receive him royally on his arrival, and service his needs in his final years. After death his body could be preserved in a mausoleum that would outlast any artefact on Earth, a uniquely durable memorial to human aspirations and follies that should satisfy any megalomaniacal aspirations.

Lord Martin Rees
Former Astronomer Royal
Trinity College
University of Cambridge

What does “amazing abundance” mean?

Please could Mr Musk explain what “an age of amazing abundance” means in real, practical terms. Does he envisage endless fields of wheat and rice and fruit-laden orchards, or simply freely available techno bits and pieces directing our every move? A Musk-style utopian future is even less alluring than Aldous Huxley’s “Island” or William Morris’s “News from Nowhere”.

Sheila Coutts
Denmead, Hampshire

Values, fiction and AI

Mr Musk’s forecasts may or may not prove correct, but I note that he cited Iain M. Banks’s novels for a glimpse into what things might be like. He also mentioned the importance of AI models having “values” (though he didn’t say what those values would be).

Ian McEwan’s novel, “Machines Like Me”, about a humanoid robot called Adam, explores the tensions in values between humans and machines. The theme of the book is evident also in your article about China wanting to end AI romances (“No more bots”, July 18th), as Adam (robot), Charlie (human) and Miranda (also human) form a love triangle.

Naomi Stanford
London

More letters in response to our interview with Elon Musk can be read at economist.com/letters/musk

Household income and female breadwinners

It is true that the share of American households where female income exceeds male income remains rather low (“For richer or poorer”, July 25th). But your interpretation in terms of social norms can hardly be considered as final. For one thing, the 50% threshold, whereby the distribution of wives’ share of household income drops sharply at the point where they begin to out earn their husbands, seems to be specific to data in which incomes are self-reported.

In 2020 Anja Roth and Michaela Slotwinski used a Swiss data set combining survey and administrative information for the same individual and their partner. They found that individuals misreport incomes in surveys, that this misreporting is consistent with the male breadwinner norm and that it essentially explains the observed discontinuity in reported earnings. In a recent paper that I co-authored using Dutch tax data, we similarly failed to find any evidence of the 50% threshold. It is probable that gender norms can motivate spouses to marginally misreport their actual incomes, but the economic consequences of a reporting bias are quite different from those of actual economic decisions.

More important, Claudia Goldin has repeatedly shown that gender differences in wages and incomes often reflect subtle differences in occupational choices. For instance, women are more likely to opt for the flexible job that allows for child-care pick-ups, sick days and household management, whereas men are more likely to go for the “greedy” jobs. Exclusively interpreting this tendency as the outcome of deeply entrenched gender norms is too simplistic, if only because such specialisation may, in some circumstances, be efficient for the household under consideration, particularly in the presence of children.

What is needed is a deeper understanding of the technology of human-capital acquisition by young children. For example, are a mother’s and a father’s times perfect substitutes, imperfect substitutes, or complements? This is a very active area of current research, involving economists and developmental psychologists.

In basically all developed countries, and in a significant number of middle- or even low-income ones, women are now more educated than men. This crucially important change remains largely underdiscussed, despite its potentially major consequences. In the end, the scarcity of female breadwinners may progressively wane, but much is still to be learned about this process.

Pierre-André Chiappori
Professor of economics
Columbia University
New York

Africa’s expanding cities

It is indeed better to plan for an urban future in Africa than react after the fact (“Sprawl for all”, July 4th). Planning infrastructure pays for itself. Your piece shows that basic street plans raised land values in Dar es Salaam’s suburbs, but that the gains flowed to grey-market speculators and the well-connected.

Half of urban Africa’s footprint in 2050 is not yet built, so the value its future roads and pipes will create has not yet been pocketed. African cities now collect around $8 a head in property tax, against $220 worldwide. Capture just a part of that gain and the urbanisation that connects people to productive jobs can start to finance itself.

With the world’s largest surge in working-age people ahead, few fiscal reforms would do more for Africa’s growth.

Mark Henstridge
Chief executive officer
Oxford Policy Management
Oxford

History, culture and technology

A forgotten heroine

Rosa Parks is rightly celebrated for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, thus sparking the civil-rights movement (America at 250). That was on December 1st 1955. Several black people had been arrested before Parks during 1955 for doing the same thing, notably 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who was arrested on March 2nd.

In 1956, Colvin was one of the four plaintiffs in Browder v Gayle, a federal lawsuit that ended segregation not only on Montgomery’s buses, but also on public transport throughout America. After that she was mostly forgotten. Her courageous act in part inspired Montgomery’s black community to protest against segregation laws, though it was the arrest of Parks that sparked a boycott of the city’s transport system that lasted over a year.

Strikingly, part of the reason for Colvin’s disappearance from the history of the civil-rights movement lay with the black community at the time. Black residents considered the young Colvin a troublemaker and local activists found Parks to be a more suitable person to rally round. By Colvin’s own account she thought she was too dark-skinned and too poor to win the crucial support of Montgomery’s black middle class. She also became pregnant out of wedlock during the year, which didn’t help. Colvin died in January this year.

Magaly Rodríguez García
Associate professor
KU Leuven
Leuven, Belgium

Down the old rub-a-dub

I read your great obituary of Humphrey Smith, the owner of the “proudly independent Samuel Smith Old Brewery” in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire (July 18th). His strictly enforced restrictions on the use of mobile technology at his pubs (“no mobile phones except outside, no laptops or tablets”) and a music-free environment (“no Muzak either, just the buzz of conversation”) created uniquely sociable surroundings.

Sadly, in recent years the rules in London have been relaxed and phones and even laptops are now common in Samuel Smith’s pubs, even in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. Often it is only the sound of young city types chatting away on telecoms that interrupts the doom scrolling. Mr Smith will be turning in his Yorkshire grave.

CHRIS DRAKE
Leicester

Vox populi

When Sir Francis Galton famously asked people to guess the weight of an ox at a fair in Plymouth in 1906, he did not offer the participants the option of giving him money in order to enter 99 additional guesses and skew the average. But this is in effect how current prediction markets work, and is also why they don’t work (“Fixing the truth machine”, July 25th).

Bob Fisher
Houston

Blessed are the false positives

I can confirm that software designed to detect AI-generated text are indeed “black-box algorithms that can give false positives” (“Paper trails”, August 1st). I ran some texts through an AI detector.

Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” and “Happy Days” were judged likely to be 86% and 84% AI-generated. The Sermon on the Mount was thought to be 100% AI-generated. The programme judged a speech by Donald Trump to be 100% human-generated.

Brendan Lyons
Dublin

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